Ceal Floyer
27 March – 16 May 2014

Ceal Floyer tests, teases and skirts around the boundaries of what art can
or should be in her first exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Milan, which
coincides with a major presentation of her works at Museion in nearby Bolzano
(1 February – 4 May, 2014). Floyer’s 2008 work, Taking a Line for a Walk, in which a machine that creates the white
lines on sports fields is driven around until it runs out of paint, takes its
title from Paul Klee’s assertion in the introduction to his Pedagogical Sketchbook of 1923 that a
drawing should be: “An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A
walk for walk’s sake” Floyer’s own meandering line through space – a
performance and a sculpture, as much as a drawing or painting – will be recreated
throughout the galleries, drawing visitors downstairs and outside. A rectangular
swathe of grass in the courtyard, entitled Greener
Grass (2014), will indeed – as
the old saying goes – seem brighter than its counterpart in nature and more
vivid than real life.

Another genre-defying sculptural work, Press (2014), is a single sheet of creased newsprint with the sole
impression of a hot iron placed at its centre, both an attempt to iron out the imperfections
in the paper and a play on the double meaning of the word ‘press’. A new
photographic piece and a another new sculpture will also question what we are
seeing and hearing, with a still image of a high-speed spinning top and an
audio piece which reiterates and echoes a song concerned chiefly with the visual
medium of video. Floyer’s survey of work at Museion, also in northern Italy, features
ten installations, including Scale
(2007), an assemblage of speakers resembling a flight of stairs leading up to a
ceiling that plays the sound of what could be ascending steps; Drop (2013), a video that waits for
beads of water to drip (or literally a drop to drop) and Exit (2006) in which the artist cut out the iconic shape of the door
from the sign for an emergency exit, thus creating another exit entirely.